Now till October

I guess from August on it is going to get expensive for gaming. There are so many good titles coming out that it is going to be difficult to decide what to buy. There are also current titles that I still want to buy so that compounds the issue.

Stranglehold
- I'll likely buy it, I really like the idea of destructible environments, everything I've seen suggests that it will be a good game

The Darkness
- I haven't tried the demo yet but I hope to get it, I may pick it up used instead though considering all the good games this year

C&C3
- Since EA is pretty liberal with their price drops (LOTR as a basis for my theory) I'm hoping I can get a new copy for $39 or less

Bioshock
- must have, there is no question about this title

Medal of Honor : Airborne
- still up in the air, since Infinity Ward abandoned the MOH series it has sucked, everything I've seen of this title looks cool but I'll wait on some reviews first

MotoGP07
- I liked 06 but it had too many performance issues, 07 fixed the issues but the game now feels generic. Not sure how they lost it but I'll be skipping this title

Blue Dragon
- you know how much I LOVE jRPGs (NOT!) no way I'll ever own this game

Flatout : Ultimate Carnage
- I loved the demo, loved the PC title of this game, a friend of a friend has some music on the game's soundtrack. I'll be buying it.

Halo 3
- I'll buy it to say I have all 3 but honestly I am not all that excited for it (I still haven't finished Halo2 to be honest)

Mass Effect
- looks great but I can't play another 70 hour game, Oblivion almost killed me and by end I hated it, so much so I traded it in so I wouldn't have to see it again. Mass Effect looks to be in the same vein.

Jerico
- doubtful, looks too generic

GTAIV
- must buy, I'm a sucker for sandbox games

Half Life 2 : Orange
- must buy, even though I own HL2 and HL2-EP1 for the PC I will buy and play it again on the 360.

Overlord

I really like Overlord, I still have a lot to accomplish in Forza2 but for now Overlord is taking a lot of my free time. The concept for the game is brilliant, though I guess it borrows a lot of thinking from a Nintendo game called Pikmin. I never played Pikmin so for me it's all new and pretty unique.
Some things do bother me though, the control scheme needs some refinement. When trying to select something for action (flag marker, spawn point, item in the world) it becomes pretty difficult to target them, especially when the action is frantic. I'm not sure how they would improve it to be honest, perhaps just simply revising the puzzle to make sure that it's difficult to put each item on the same plane, though even that may be difficult.
I like the humor, the voice acting of Gnarl is really good and funny which is something more games need, light-hearted humor.
I'm not very far in the game I suspect but I'd estimate that I'm about 10 hours in, likely 40% complete the game. I haven't really spent much on upgrading my armor/weapons. I think it will probably be difficult to get all the achievements. Looks like a few people on my friends list have the game so at least I have someone to play against.

Don't upgrade to Vista

I haven't updated this stuff for a while.
I was in Denver for a week, picked up Overlord. At the time it wasn't available in Canada so I figured why not. I was going to buy The Darkness too but figured that would be a bit much. I do plan on picking up Darkness soon though. (along with C&C3, sheesh where am I gonna get all this dough).
I also 'upgraded' to Vista, which I wholeheartedly regret. I installed a demo of Vista on an empty drive. It went smoothly and I used it for about 3 days without issue. Back when XP came out I had a lot of problems with drivers, etc so I made sure that all the hardware I have worked fine on Vista which it did. I decided to upgrade from MCE2005 to Vista and that is where the problems started.
First attempt failed and took my data drive with the failure. Not sure why but my attached USB drive lost it's FAT table. I was pretty sure that I lost 200+ GB of photos, music home movies, some of it irreplacable. I'm pretty sure that the failure to install Vista caused the drive to lose it's table as I've been using the drive for nearly a year now. I managed to buy some drive recovery software that helped restore my critical files. Needless to say that failure cost me a weeks worth of time trying to recover my files.
Second attempt finally worked but I noticed some odd behavior. I have a NAS drive and for some reason with Vista the drive is constantly in use. I don't understand why but Vista seems to constantly poll the drive. In fact the machine in general seems a lot slower. The CPU usage is nearly always at 3-5% for no reason. Network access always seems to be happening and disk is nearly always working, even with 2gb of memory.
Here is the biggest problem. When I installed the 30 day demo I was so focused on the problems I had with XP (drivers) I failed to see if my key software was working. Sadly with Vista I cannot run some of my most important software. I can't run Nero, I can't run Pinnacle Studio. This means I'm sort of dead in the water.
I am really disappointed with Vista, I can't recommend it to anyone really, even as a new OS. In general it seems really unreliable (I occasionally get BSODs for no reason) it eats system resources so your PC will feel a LOT slower than with XP and the software support is non-existant.
I bought a refurbished PC for my wife with MCE2005 so I can install my mission critical software. Vista has been such a bad experience this is the first time in a long time that I've been really disappointed with Microsoft. They should not have released this software yet. It's just not ready. It has a lot of potential but to unleash this on the non-computer literate population is bad news in my book. I regret my choice to move from MCE2005 and now I dread even using my PC in fear that something will happen to cause me to lose my data.
I can't wait till the refurbished PC arrives so I can attach my mission critical drives and software so I'll feel a lot better about my data being safe.